


Once Upon

by Hth



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode Related: Sleeping Beauty, M/M, Series: Sixteen Instinctual Behaviors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 00:11:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/791793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair has something to say; Jim mostly sleeps through the whole story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Upon

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Sleeping Beauty.

## Once Upon

by Betty Plotnick

Author's webpage: <http://internettrash.com/users/livia/plotnick/betty.htm>

Author's disclaimer: PetFly created these characters, and actually, someone other than me wrote some of the dialogue near the beginning. I haven't bothered to go find out who, but I don't mean any harm by it, really.

* * *

Once Upon  
by Betty Plotnick 

Blair was walking up the stairs in the darkened loft. He could see the sun and the blue sky through the window, but inside, everything was black and softened around the edges. His senses were acting up; he could hear Jim's breathing above him. He could smell Jim everywhere, like a veil across his own face. 

_It isn't real,_ Blair said to himself, his own voice clear and chiming inside his ear. _I must be dreaming all of this...._

Jim was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding a paper heart in his hands. In the dark, Blair couldn't see it very clearly, and Jim wasn't looking at it at all. He was looking at Blair, expectantly, waiting for him to speak. 

_Jim,_ he wanted to say, _I think I'm having this crazy dream. What's up with the lights?_

But instead, when he opened his mouth, what came out was, "I have all these feelings. I get mixed up." 

Plaintive and beseeching, Blair knew immediately that they weren't his words. He would never -- not to Jim. He worked damn hard to hold his focus, to operate like a scientist, a partner, a grownup. Grownups acknowledged their feelings, defined them, used them to best effect, and exorcized whatever couldn't be used. A professional man, a man upon whom lives depended, Blair Sandburg couldn't, would not, allow himself to be _mixed up._

Nor would he appeal to Jim to fix it for him. That was his place, to keep his head together. Jim was not his therapist, his father, or his rabbi. He would straighten it out himself. He wouldn't dump it in Jim's lap. 

Not his words. Someone else's, welling up like freshwater out of Blair's dream-body. 

"You've been through a lot," Jim said, and the neutrality in his voice was comforting somehow. "It's going to get better. Things will change." 

He believed it. Jim said it, and Blair believed it completely, hook, line, and sinker, he would have bought _stock_ in it. The last couple of years had been a series of highs and lows, fear and ecstasy, strength of purpose and a crippling sense of ineffectiveness, but it wouldn't be this way forever. Jim, steady, capable, pragmatic Jim -- he couldn't be wrong about this. Blair let out a long breath of relief. He wanted to thank Jim, but instead what he said was, "But maybe I don't want things to change. Maybe if things change too much, you won't be around anymore." 

Not Blair's words. Because he trusted Jim; Jim would always be in his life, one way or another. Jim could never leave him. After all this time, there was no way to separate, no more division between what was Jim's life and what was Blair's. Things changed, but Jim Ellison stayed \-- Blair's partner, Blair's friend, Blair's Sentinel, Blair's reward for being a good person and a good student, smart and warm and personable and creative. He _deserved_ Jim. Taking Jim out of the picture -- that was more than a change. That would be a reversal, one that negated everything. 

Someone else speaking through him, and suddenly Blair felt that other consciousness, a horrible and alien sense of fear and hopelessness taking up space inside him. Life without Jim. Waking, sleeping, eating, meditating, writing -- and always wondering where Jim was, how Jim was. Always wondering \-- what had changed -- what had gone wrong with his calculations, how he could possibly have misjudged their situation so badly. 

Panic rose through him, the claw-grip of a full-bore nightmare. And Jim, stupid bastard, powerful and inflexible Jim fucking Ellison, was smiling silkily up at him, pacifying him with that smooth voice, saying, "I'm not going anywhere. We'll always be able to be friends, and that's not going to change." 

With horror, Blair realized that it was even worse than not speaking in his own words; Jim was looking right at him, and he was seeing _someone else._ There was no scientist reflected in Jim's blue eyes, not even a partner, not even a goddamn grownup. He was seeing -- what? The neohippie with the flyaway hair, champion of lost causes, eternal college student -- seeing a ball of _feelings_ and theories and intuition, untempered by harsh experience? Blair reached down and ripped the paper Jim held out of his hand. Pink construction paper, blocky lettering in magic marker. It said _Blair._ Blair crumpled it up before he read the rest. He didn't want to see it, couldn't live with the sight of it. It didn't belong to him. It wasn't his, it was no part of him. 

"What if I want you to be more than just my friend?" Blair growled out, when what he really wanted to say was, _Jim, man, what's happening to us?_

And it wasn't Jim looking at him, couldn't possibly be Jim gazing up at him with such unbearable serenity in his eyes, such sensible evenness. Not the Jim Ellison that Blair knew, not his Jim. Because he'd seen Jim's face when there was a fire lit an inch below the surface, the way Jim's eyes roared with challenge and smoked with hunger. The real Jim Ellison \-- Blair knew how he felt. He knew what worlds Jim contained, and knew that those lost continents were his to explore, whenever he chose, whenever the time was right. But now, in Jim's eyes, Blair could only see ocean. "Blair," he said, his voice mild and malleable, offering nothing to hold onto, "so much has happened to you. I think your emotions are a little confused right now." 

It sucked everything out of Blair at once. He didn't know Jim. He didn't know himself. He didn't know why he'd come here or what he had thought he could ever say to Jim. Almost two years, and so much had happened to him, evolving him into something that Blair couldn't define at all. He was emotional. He was confused. He was terrified. 

Blair began to stumble backwards, away from this thing that was not the Jim he'd put his trust in, the one he had been following all this time, not even the slightest bit mixed up or confused, because Jim's path had to be the right path. That Jim was gone, and he was alone in the loft with a stranger, and all the familiar things around him, his home, looked threatening and out of place. 

Jim stood up as if to follow him, and Blair heard himself yell, heard both simple anger and a strange spiral out of control in his voice as he cried out, "You think I'm just a _child_?" Words seemed to come out of Jim's mouth, garbled and staticky. Blair heard, _Not mature_ and _Still real_ and he put his hands up over his ears, knowing that it was a silly and childish way to avoid an idea -- anyway, ideas were good, Blair's whole life was about mastering one idea after another, wasn't it? -- but unable to stop himself. 

He stepped back, and there was nothing under his heel. He was at the top of the stairs, and even though Jim reached out to grab his arm, it was too late, and Blair felt himself pitch backwards into blankness. 

He woke up out of breath and almost paralyzed with the intensity of it. Then he began to laugh, nervously at first, then out of sheer, life-affirming relief. It was _over._ It was done. 

Stacey, Blair remembered then. Those had been Stacey's words, overheard just a few days ago and lurking around in the stew of his subconscious only to be kicked up to the front by an unlikely firing of neurons as his brain sifted through its memory banks deciding what to keep and what to toss. _Weird._

"Chief?" 

"Come in," he said automatically, and Jim took him up on the offer. "What time is it?" 

"Don't worry, you haven't overslept yet," Jim chuckled. 

Blair managed to read the dim blue glow of the clock face as the sleep-fog cleared out of his eyes. Four-ten. "What are you -- oh, man, was I keeping you awake? I was having all these crazy dreams...." 

Jim shrugged an took a drink from something he was holding. "You and the rest of Cascade. It's just one of those...loud nights." 

"You should wear your--" 

"It's no big deal, Sandburg. I'm not tired." 

Blair sat up in bed, wondering if only a crazy person would be feeling the need right now to run some kind of test on his roommate to make sure he was...really his roommate. It was hard to tell, in the darkness, with Jim leaning against the doorframe, his inner fires all banked and his control firmly in place. Blair wouldn't really be able to _know_ that it had been nothing but a dream, not until he could check it out. 

Yeah. Crazy. Because of _course_ it was a dream -- what else would it have been? Something about Stacey's words, or maybe just something about her emotional dependence on Jim's approval, something had struck a chord in his subconscious mind, and he'd acted out a fantasy, a fear of losing Jim's respect. Dreams could do that, could be a dry-run for something you feared, your deep mind trying to prepare you for something you consciously believed was so unlikely as to be absurd. 

Unlikely that Jim could ever go away. Unlikely that he would ever look down on Blair like that, mistaking his empathy for immaturity or his eccentricities for callow unworldliness. Unlikely that either of them would ever forget that there was a bond between them that was more than a friendship, and much more than a crush. 

"You think I'm just a child?" Blair heard himself say, and it was wholly disorienting, knocking over his sense of dreaming and reality like a kicked sandcastle. Was that his voice? Had he spoken aloud? Was that his fear? Was he here at all, or some strange half-waking intermediary? Everything seemed to spin, inside Blair's head and outside it. 

"What?" Jim said, half intrigued and half annoyed. "Of course I don't. What are you talking about?" 

And then he remembered, as clearly as if he'd spent all day replaying it in his memory. "You said I had a way with children because I wasn't that far removed. I heard you say it." Of course. Heard it, then forgotten it -- or maybe not. 

He could see Jim's mouth twitch in a faint smile. "Jesus, Chief, that was a month or more ago. You been hanging onto that all this time?" 

"Trust me, no one's more surprised than I am," Blair muttered. 

"Well, if it bugged you so much, you could've just said something." 

Blair shrugged and smiled back at him, an affable sort of _you know me_ gesture. Which didn't make much sense in context, because normally Blair _did_ say something. Normally Blair talked about everything, hashed endlessly over whatever offhanded comment Jim came up with, its meaning, its ramifications. Blair Sandburg was not the suppressed-memory type. 

"Is this about the crazy dreams?" 

Damn Jim's overdeveloped detective-brain. Blair shrugged again, and thought about lying, but when push came to shove, found that he didn't have it in him. Not tonight, not to Jim. "I had this dream about Stacey. Sort of about Stacey. I guess -- I guess it was more like, Stacey was talking, but -- Oh, forget it. Forget it, I just want to get a little more sleep before my first class." 

"Okay," Jim agreed comfortably. "I had a weird dream earlier tonight, too, actually. I was back in Vice, and I was stationed in the middle of the woods. My job was to scare the scavenger birds away from the bodies of these seven dead prostitutes that were just lying there in front of me." 

"You win. That's way freakier than my dream." 

Jim got that low, gruff tone in his voice that always signaled an admission that he normally wouldn't make of his own free will. "Part of why I left Vice -- I had a lot of nightmares back then. Funny, because you would think that Major Crimes.... Oh, who knows? Dreams are dreams. They never make any sense." 

Blair yawned wide enough to make his jaw pop slightly. "Sounds almost like a fairy tale -- forest, ravens, seven dead sisters." 

"Some fucked-up fairy tale. But then, I guess if fairy tales are supposed to teach us what to fear and how to cope with our fears, then they probably should be getting more fucked up as the world does." 

"I don't know that the world is all that much more-- Whoa, hang on, earth to Jim Ellison. Excuse me, was that a little Jungian analysis of oral folk culture, there?" 

Usually when Blair called Jim on his surprisingly vast store of impractical knowledge, Jim blustered it off with something self-deprecating, some kind of, _Me? You're the guy who gets his mail sent to the Ivory Tower, Darwin; I'm just along for the ride._

"I had to read a little Bettelheim in college," Jim said coolly. 

"Oh, man. I am _so_ in love with you." 

It might have been the wrong thing to say, but somehow it didn't seem to be. Jim just smirked at him until it was suddenly Blair and not Jim at all who was a little nervous, and he launched into the first words that came to mind to break the silence. "Of course, Bettelheim's out of fashion now. He's a little _too_ Jungian. I mean, I'm a Jungian, but I have a sense of _perspective_ about it. These days, you'd have to read some Marina Warner or Jack Zipes, or personally I'm into Cashdan, I think he's doing some cool work with the psychology of folklore that doesn't--" 

"Chief. Go to sleep, would you?" 

"I hear that. Goodnight, Jim." 

When he was gone, it occurred to Blair to wonder why he hadn't tried harder to tell Jim about the dream. It was interesting, wasn't it? That maybe some part of Blair had identified with Stacey; after all, other men Blair's age were getting married and having kids and starting careers, and Blair was years behind them, still in school, still dating women he had absolutely no interest in having a relationship with, dicking around with a dissertation that he was beginning to suspect could never safely be published at all, still dragging his feet over this business of Jim, playing it by ear as though he had all the time in the world. 

But things changed. People changed. And Jim was older, he was a guy with a 401k plan, a guy who owned his own place and had been down the aisle once already. There was a gulf between their experiences -- in some ways, yeah, between their maturity levels. Maybe. It would've been interesting to ask Jim what he thought of the dream, anyway. 

Slightly abashed, it occurred to Blair: he'd never had the guts to do what Stacey did. With a lot more hope of success than she ever had, with more of a support network than she could possibly have had, Stacey had just...asked him. Just used her vocabulary -- a twelve-year-old's vocabulary, infinitely inferior to Blair's -- to get across the salient points: _I want you, I'm afraid of losing you, I want to be enough for you in your eyes. I am not your friend; I feel something bigger than that, something not as easy to pin down._

Words Blair had never actually spoken. Sure, he told himself it was all _implied,_ that the words didn't have to be spoken after everything they'd done for each other. But on the other hand, maybe he was just a rotten coward who needed a little kid to do his talking for him, even inside his own head. Hell, he hadn't even had the courage to discuss it with Jim as a hypothetical, to reveal the details of his dream. 

_Nice work, Mr. Share-Your-Feelings. Serve you right if Jim laughed in your face the next time you tell him he can't keep things all bottled up._

Blair knew the buzzwords, the language of formal psychoanalysis, and practically every holistic or alternative branch of therapy to boot -- courtesy of that year and a half in the 31 flavors of counseling that followed David the Terrible. Funny how he didn't even remember the man's name anymore -- Naomi took to calling him David the Terrible after he was gone, and it was the only way Blair ever thought of him after that \-- but he remembered everything he ever learned about opening up, processing, and healing your emotional wounds. All of it, some useful, some ridiculous, some a little of each. 

He'd had nightmares, that year when he was eleven, and one of the counselors taught him about lucid dreaming. You go back in after a nightmare and you play the whole scene over again -- except on your terms. Say what you should have said, end it the way you chose to end it. It had cured his nightmares, when he was a child. And since the subconscious never really got any older or more immune to deception...it could just as easily work now. 

It was worth a try. He was going back to sleep anyway. 

It came together slowly, the details of the darkened loft forming gradually so that it seemed the stairs materialized just ahead of Blair's feet. But the sound of Jim's heartbeat and the smell of Jim came quickly, so strong that it almost made him dizzy. By the top step, it was all there, exactly like Blair remembered. Jim, sitting there, waiting for him with the paper heart in his hands. 

"I need to tell you something," Blair said. It was just a test, to see if his voice would obey him. It did. 

"Shut up," Jim said, almost pleasantly. 

"No, Jim -- you gotta listen to me. I'm serious, I--" 

"You're always serious." 

"Jim--" 

"I know. I already know, Sandburg." 

The Jim that came out of his subconscious was every bit as annoying as the real version. Oddly heartwarming, actually. "I don't care if you know or not. I mean, of _course_ you know -- you're nothing but a piece of me, a mask -- you're something I want to say to myself, but can't picture _myself_ saying. The point is, this is not about _me_ talking to _you._ I just want to say it. I just -- want to put it in words." 

"You already did. Look." Jim held out the pink heart, and reluctantly, Blair took it from him and unfolded it. There was no magic marker this time, just Blair's own ballpoint scrawl, the same writing Jim must have seen a million times in notes on the refrigerator, all over his paperwork, in open notebooks tossed on top of the television. It said, _Blair Loves Jim._

"I didn't write this." 

"Let it go, Blair." 

"Just let me say it, Jim! God, it's my lucid dream, and you won't even let me get a word in edgewise!" 

Suddenly, Jim reached out and grabbed him by the wrists, holding his hands still, the heart still clasped tightly in them. "Do you think your pretty words mean a fucking thing to me? Here?" 

"What the hell do you mean, it doesn't mean anything to you? This is what I do, Jim -- this is who I am! I explain things; isn't that what you want from me? Isn't that what you've always wanted from me?" 

"This isn't who you are. You think it is, but you're wrong. Listen. Listen." 

Somewhere, far away, Blair could hear a slow, sad moaning that made him shudder with sympathy. Another voice joined in, and a third, and he realized they weren't human moans at all. It sounded like a pack of wolves. "I don't -- Jim, I don't understand. What are you telling me?" 

"I'm not telling you anything. This story can't be told." 

"I'm a scientist, goddammit. I'm your partner, I'm an adult, I'm a human being. We have words, we use words. _Drink to me only with thine eyes_ isn't _literal,_ Jim, it's a poem, it's _words._ We're the storytelling animals -- we pass on our experiences through language, it may be the only thing that sets us apart, the way we assign meaning to events that don't inherently have--" 

"Blair Sandburg. _Shut up._ Shut up. Don't talk to me." His hands moved roughly up Blair's forearms, leaving gooseflesh behind as they went. The howling of the wolves was meltingly beautiful, lulling Blair into a strange calm state. His hands opened, and the paper fluttered unnoticed to his feet. 

The room seemed to be getting darker -- no, not darker, but his vision was becoming more opaque, details blurring into each other until his eyes couldn't fasten on to any one thing, not even Jim's familiar blue eyes. "What's happening to me?" he asked breathlessly. 

"You can't see well. You track by sound and scent." 

"I'm a _human being._ " 

"Turn the light out. I want your tongue and your teeth. I'm deeper in you than the sound of your voice. You can talk to the ravens and the seven dead sisters, but the only way out of the forest is by walking. Fuck paper, Blair; you've given me enough paper to last a lifetime. I want this now." His hand settled on Blair's chest, over his heart, and Blair bowed his head, lulled into passive silence by the strange cadences of Jim's voice. They stood that way, dream-time passing immeasurably, one of Jim's hands on his arm, the other against his chest. 

And then his hand moved again, reaching up to catch hold of Blair's ponytail, and Blair felt himself fall in a dream for the second time that night, but forward this time, collapsing on top of Jim. Half blind, his hands found Jim's face easily, and his mouth found Jim's even more easily. Jim's teeth were sharp, but the taste of him was exactly right, precisely Jim, and Blair pressed harder into the kiss, until he couldn't think and his whole body was a howl. 

* * *

End

 


End file.
